Archive for the ‘Editors' Dispatches’ Category

Dispatch from California

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

CR’s own prodigal editor, Don Bogen (who also goes by the monikers “The Bogues,” “Bogedy,” and “Dr. Bojangles” ) was in San Francisco last Monday for the CR reading at the Stable Cafe. Here’s Don’s account of the event:

By sheer coincidence, I had a chance to attend the first Greetings from Cincinnati Review reading last Monday, March 26, in San Francisco.  Thanks to the imagination and tireless energies of Nick Johnson, a poet and contributor to our most recent issue (8.2), I found myself among some sixty people huddled around space heaters in the courtyard of the Stable Cafe–things cool off at night in San Francisco.  Nick read along with two other poets in 8.2—Dan Bellm and Rebekah Bloyd—and the evening came to a close with some short prose sketches by Ian Tuttle, who, though not yet a contributor, cajoled his listeners with some satiric looks at the yuppified cafe crowds at various spots in the city, including the Stable itself.  We kept warm with wine, beer, snacks, and great writing, and though the outside lamp failed as the sun set, Dan Bellm’s trusty pocket flashlight saved the day—or the night.  Many books sold, much conviviality, and many toasts raised to the magazine and its contributors.

There are more writers than you can shake a stick at in the Bay Area, and a good number of them have been in The Cincinnati Review.  Rebecca Foust, who was in issue 5.2, made the trip down from Marin, and others sent regrets:  D. A. Powell (7.1) and C. S. Giscombe (5.2) were out of town doing visiting stints at the University of Iowa and Temple respectively, Randall Mann (7.2) was flying to Zurich for his job, and Dean Rader (7.2) was in the blurry time zone of life with a newborn.

Fortunately, there are rumors of a repeat event on the Berkeley side of the Bay sometime later this year, and, further north, talk of taking the show to Seattle, another hotbed of contributors.  Jeff Von Ward, who came up with the truly great Cincinnati poster for the reading—postcard, technicolor stripes and all—has been kind enough to offer it as a template for later events.  So contributors and friends beyond the West Coast who wish to do their own version of a Greetings from Cincinnati Review reading have things all set up.  It’s a great way to get the word out about the fine work we publish from all over.

Also, there are videos of the reading on youtube. Here’s one of event organizer and CR contributor Nick Johnson:

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Posted in Editors' Dispatches, From our Contributors |

Relative Clauses Revealed

Monday, February 13th, 2012

We’ve got grammar on our ganglia as we painstakingly copy-edit our summer number in the hope of getting it to the typesetter by week’s end. Twice a year, as we peer at the sentences and lines that make up each two-hundred-plus-page issue, we encounter many of the same across-the-board errors. We all have different responses to comma splices and misplaced mods and the like. Matt McBride twirls his green pencil faster and faster and faster until its sheer rotary power lifts him from his chair. Lisa tends to growl low in her throat, but because she has a naturally melodic voice, the sound comes out more coronet than cougar. Becky’s eyes burst into flame, and she has to run to the water fountain to put them out. Matt O’Keefe emits an unusual odor—a cross between persimmon and new car smell. And Nicola loses consciousness—only for about ten seconds—which is why she works with one of those c-shaped airplane pillows around her neck. To spare our staff these distractions, we’ve decided to shed blog light on phrases beginning with “which” and “that” (also known as nonrestrictive and restrictive clauses).

In short:

that = restrictive = no comma

which = nonrestrictive = comma

The trick in using these words correctly, though, is figuring out whether the clause (or rather the information the clause contains) can be removed without sacrificing meaning. If you can’t remove the clause without changing the meaning, the clause is restrictive.

Example: Pudding that eats through your bowl like acid is not a good choice for dessert.

If you can remove the clause and the sentence still makes perfect sense, the clause is nonrestrictive.

Example: Baklava, which is hard to say if your mouth is full of acid pudding, is yummier than foods that dissolve your tongue.

We hope this editorial interlude clears up any confusion—and that we haven’t made you terrified of semi-liquid comestibles. Happy writing!

Posted in Editors' Dispatches |

A Bit of Publishing History

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

Nicola Mason: I recently received word from one of our contributors, Jamie Quatro, that her story collection has been taken for publication by Grove/Atlantic. (CR was lucky enough to present the title story, “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement,” to our readership in issue 6.2.) When I read this excellent news, I was put in mind of a similar email from Ron Currie some years back. Grove/Atlantic also took his first collection, God Is Dead, which included “False Idols” (CR 2.2).

Curiously, there is yet another, albeit more tenuous, connection between CR and Grove that involves an interesting bit of publishing history.

The story begins with the legendary Richard Seaver, who, as a Fulbright scholar in Paris in the 1950s, championed the work of an unknown playwright named Samuel Beckett. His essay on the young Irishman caught the eye of Barney Rosset, who had just acquired Grove Press. Rosset went on to become Beckett’s first American publisher, and a few years later brought Richard Seaver on board as an editor. Grove was already known  for being avant-garde, and after Seaver arrived, the press became notorious—issuing US editions of such works as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Story of O, and Che Guevara’s The Bolivian Diary, as well as publishing other controversial texts like Naked Lunch, Tropic of Cancer, Last Exit to Brooklyn, City of Night, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Seaver went on to become Grove’s editor in chief, then in 1988 started his own independent publishing house—Arcade. And here is where, from the standpoint of this post, the tale comes full circle, for it was Dick Seaver—then in his seventies—who acquired the first novel of our fiction editor, Michael Griffith. Spikes was followed by Bibliophilia, but before Arcade could issue Michael’s third book, Seaver suffered a heart attack. He passed away at age eighty-two, and without his vision and force of personality behind it, Arcade went bankrupt. Michael’s marooned manuscript (Trophy) found a home with TriQuarterly Books. Though very happy with his new house, Michael has great memories of his dealings with Seaver, a brilliant editor and one of the last of the midcentury titans of publishing.

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Posted in Editors' Dispatches, Literary News |

Dispatches from Belfast

Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

Poetry editor Don Bogen, who has been off fellowshipping at the Heaney Centre in Belfast for what seems (to our lonesome staff) a great age, is soon to fly back to us. Appropriate, then, that his last across-the-pond post takes, as its topic, birds.

Don Bogen: A word about birds. They seem especially noticeable here, perhaps because we’re close to the river Lagan, which opens into the Irish Sea at Belfast Lough and, in the other direction, winds some dozen miles through a nature preserve along an old canal path to the former linen-mill town of Lisburn. Gulls of various species hover over our narrow street, particularly on garbage day. Along the canal path, you see more gulls, ducks, coots, moorhens and herons. As for land-oriented birds, magpies are ubiquitous and striking in their black, white, and glinting blue plumage. They look elegant but sound like ratchets—the Spanish word for them, urracas, is onomatopoetic. The crow of Ireland is the hooded crow—not completely black but with a grayish torso and black wings and head. A sturdy, good-sized creature, it looks like a raven wearing a vest. It sounds, well, like a crow. But the real singers here are the blackbirds—too small and plain to notice much, but you do hear them. Their call is rich, lyrical, and varied, like a musical conversation.

The blackbird is the symbol of the Seamus Heaney Centre. The founding director, the  poet Ciaran Carson, came up with this idea on his way to the interview for the position. He told us that he was nervous about getting the job—there are a lot of poets and folks like him with arts administration experience in Belfast—and just as he was about to enter the building, a blackbird came out of the hedge and sang to encourage him. There’s a lovely medieval Irish poem about the bird, found in the margins of an illuminated manuscript (those monks would get tired of copying the Gospels), which Ciaran has translated this way:

the little bird
that whistled shrill
from the nib of
its yellow bill:

a note let go
o’er Belfast Lough –
a blackbird from
a yellow whin

“Whin” is the gorse that flowers in March and April.

Ciaran is prominent among a generation of Irish poets now in their late fifties and early sixties who were at Queen’s University when Seamus Heaney taught here—including his Centre colleague Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, and Frank Ormsby—but he is also a traditional Irish musician, playing various flutes and whistles. Music forms an important part of the Centre. The singer and scholar of Irish folk song Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin is also on staff; she keeps discovering Irish songs that Ciaran translates and she sets to music. Ciaran and his wife Deirdre, who plays fiddle, take part in a regular session at a local pub. The scene there is hardcore traditional: The musicians have a corner table and play basically for each other—no stage, little applause. Newcomers are welcome to watch, but there are strict protocols about who can sit in. First you just leave your instrument case out to let folks know what you play. Then, maybe after two or three weeks of listening, you might open the case. But you never pick up the instrument until you’re invited, and that would be after at least a month.

We were down at the place a while back to hear Ciaran and Deirdre. He came over during a break, and talk turned, as it often does here, to poetry. You know, he said, we poets all want to sing like nightingales—or maybe skylarks. Yeah, we all want to be skylarks. I blurted out Shelley’s skylark line, “Bird thou never wert,” and Ciaran continued, But you know what we really are? We’re fuckin’ parrots, man. That’s as eloquent a statement about music and literary tradition as I can think of this side of “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

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Posted in Editors' Dispatches |

Dispatches from Belfast

Tuesday, June 28th, 2011

We’re pining for our poetry editor, who is reading CR submissions all the way across the pond (ain’t technology grand). He returns this summer from his semester-long stint at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast. We look forward to hearing all about his adventures abroad, but he’s been kind enough to treat us with a few choice tidbits for our blog. Thanks, Don!

Don Bogen: Since we get our news here largely from the BBC—their Belfast studios are just down the road—it’s hard to avoid detailed coverage of things royal, including, most recently, the wedding of Wills (as the press delights in calling him) and Kate. Among the wedding gifts Queen Elizabeth presented her grandson and his bride were various titles. The one that seems to have stuck is Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, which results in their being called now, somewhat awkwardly, the Cambridges. But, to take care of this particular realm of the United Kingdom, the couple has also been named Baron and Baroness of Carrickfergus, a small town just a train ride north of Belfast, near where the inlet called Belfast Lough meets the sea. We’d been up there once before but took the trip again recently with a visiting relative.

Carrickfergus (or Fergus’s Rock, where an ancient king was shipwrecked around 530) is a rather grim town in a gorgeous setting, with lovely views across the Lough toward Bangor and east toward Scotland. Its historic claim to fame is a fortified Anglo-Norman castle dating from the twelfth century, designed for protection against invaders from the sea.  It also has remnants of a city wall from the seventeenth century, designed for protection against the locals.  There are two gates left, one of which was particularly assigned to the Irish, who were allowed to come into the town and work during the day but kept out at other times. You can hear a good bit of the complicated history of this part of the world in the names of the folks running things, starting with those Norman types John de Courcy and Hugh de Lacy, down through Sir Arthur Chichester, the governor who built the walls and whose descendents became the Donegall dynasty—and on to the Windsors. It’s possible to buy a poster of the new Baron and his wife superimposed in front of a photograph of the castle, as if the couple were floating in a rowboat just beneath the tower. I don’t think they’ve visited yet.

Carrickfergus’s other noteworthy structure is the Church of St. Nicholas, where the father of the poet Louis MacNeice was rector. MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907 but moved with his family to Carrickfergus in 1909. He spent most of his adult life in England and tends to be seen as a member of the Auden circle of the 1930s, but, as the poet Michael Longley points out in his fine introduction to MacNeice’s Selected Poems, his childhood in Ulster is fundamental to his work. Not as a source of happy memories—as the rector’s son, he felt alienated from both the working-class Catholic population and the dour Scottish Calvinism of the Presbyterians—but as the anchor for a  particular turn of mind that tempers lyricism with an eye for details in the real world. The opening of “Carrickfergus” gives a good sense of what this part of the world was like when he was a boy:

I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries

To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:

Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim

Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams

The little boats beneath the Norman castle,

The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;

The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses

But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.

The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,

The yarn-mill called its funeral cry at noon;

Our lights looked over the lough to the lights of Bangor

Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon.

Not to worry, Wills and Kate, the industrial griminess of both Belfast and Carrickfergus is long gone (along with the shipping and textile industries). The castle is thoughtfully restored—great fun to explore—and you can pose by a cannon pointing out to sea.

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Posted in Editors' Dispatches |

Dispatches from Belfast

Friday, March 18th, 2011

This just in from our esteemed poetry editor and migrant worker (weirdly, that is how Ireland views Don while he’s on fellowship in Belfast).

Don Bogen: A word about money. There are seven kinds of banknotes accepted as legal tender here in Northern Ireland:  those from the Bank of England, which (no surprise) have the Queen’s face on them; two different kinds of Scottish notes (which we have yet to see); and notes from four different banks on this side of the Irish Sea. Some of these Irish notes are fairly sober. One issued, as I recall, by Northern Bank features a nineteenth-century character with a foot-long black beard, faintly reminiscent of one of the Smith Brothers on cough drops. The Ulster Bank bills have a seal with Latin motto on the back.  First Trust Bank goes for a more modern look, with the current bank directors—a  smiling middle-aged woman with what appears to be a chain of flowers around her neck, a guy in a turtleneck—and points of interest in nature on the reverse. My favorites, though, are the notes from the Bank of Ireland (“established by royal charter 1783,” as we are informed on the front), which feature an engraving of a lady of that period and the official shields of the six counties that make up Northern Ireland. But the back is where things get really impressive. Some older bills from this bank show the main hall at Queen’s University (home of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry): a late nineteenth-century structure pretending to be a Tudor manor house. The newer ones are even more notable, as they feature the Old Bushmills distillery not far from here in County Antrim.

The bills are multicolored and of different sizes for each denomination. As many folks have remarked, U.S. currency is considerably more boring. But what if we could return to the pre-Constitution days of each state printing its own money? It would be great to have an Ohio bill featuring the site of our offices at the University of Cincinnati, McMicken Hall, which is a mid-twentieth-century structure pretending to be a nineteenth-century New England college building  pretending to be an eighteenth-century British estate. Or maybe a note featuring one of the local breweries—not as picturesque as Old Bushmills but still close to what matters. Just across the river in Kentucky, of course, there’s a range of proud enterprises of the Bushmills variety—Maker’s Mark would take on a whole new meaning on the flip side of a twenty-dollar bill.

What banknotes look like, of course, is a whole different matter from what they can buy. Suffice it to say that we have reduced our anxiety considerably by convincing ourselves that the dollar and the pound—in all its different varieties—are roughly equivalent. It’s  amazing how far a little imagination can take you.

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Posted in Editors' Dispatches |